The Farm Bill

            A complete misnomer, perhaps deliberately.  This is a very important bill going through the final phases in congress.  It should really be called The Food Bill, and then, perhaps, more people would be interested in changing it to better fit the eating constitutuants.  This bill is where our government gets to take our tax dollars and give it to the richest corporations that grow our food.  They grow our food on chemically fertilized (which means depleted) soil.  If the vitamins and minerals are not in the soil, they will not be in the plant.  Then, pesticides are used in huge quantities, which the plants take in through their leaves and roots (only what remains on the outside of the plant can be washed off), and so do the animals we eat.  This chemical soup is oil-based and the run-off gets into our water supply.  The largest food/chemical corporation, Monsanto, uses it’s genetically modified seeds (GMO) which means they take genes from other species and splice them into the plant’s DNA.  An example is tomatoes, which have frog genes spliced in as a built-in pesticide.  No one knows what effect this will have on us in the long run – cancer? Infertility? our DNA? – we are just the Guinea Pigs for this experiment.  Could these pesticides be killing our honey bees vital to farmers to fertilize the plants???

            That said, small farms get a very small percentage of this corporate welfare, and organic farmers even less.  This is why some foods (wheat, corn) are so cheap and why the animals that are fed this food that is unnatural to grazers like cattle is cheap, and foods that are not subsidized by you and me is so expensive.    Eating a healthy diet is quite expensive.  While the food oil and chemical corporations make poor quality food on the cheap, the oil, pharmaceutical, medical and insurance companies rake in the dollars the corporate farms spend on fertilizer and pesticides, and when our food makes us sick, the pharmaceutical, medical and insurance companies make even more money.  The sicker we get, the more money they make.  Check out “The 2008 Farm Bill” on the Union of Concerned Scientists website:  www.ucsusa.org.